Global Arc

From eighteenth-century society portraits to selfies, Anglo-American culture seems nearly ceaselessly obsessed with rendering the human form--face and body--whether of the self or of another. In this course focused on literary and visual portraiture from the eighteenth century to the present and taught largely in the Princeton University Art Museum, we will look at texts and objects side by side in an attempt to get closer to a definition of what portraiture is, what it does, how we come to know it when we see it, and what the genre says about conceptions of the self and others across axes of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.

Brexit is the defining problem for British culture and politics in the contemporary moment. This course will read twenty-first century British literature and popular culture through the lens that Brexit provides, as well as reading Brexit through the lenses of earlier historical, political, and cultural touchstones from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will look at recent works of poetry and fiction alongside film, pop music, and cultural criticism of the last fifty years to ask: what is and was "Britain" in the long lead-up to Brexit, and what might it look like in the future?

Disability theorist Tobin Siebers explains, "aesthetics track the emotions that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies." In this course, we will consider if the definition is sufficient by exploring how nineteenth-century artists and writers, and particularly those involved in the Pre-Raphaelite and Aestheticism movements, thought about and transmitted aesthetic values, particularly as such values were expressed in embodied forms.

The last two decades have ushered in an unprecedented era of change and reflection. From the shifting of political and cultural orders at the turn of the millennium to the global circulation of the internet, human modes of expression have developed in dramatically different ways. We will explore novels written in English from 2000 to the present that reflect on change -- cultural, political, technological, environmental -- and in so doing, consider our position as twenty-first century readers in relation to both the past and the future.

Inter-disciplinary class on early modern Amsterdam (1550-1720) when the city was at the center of the global economy and leading cultural center; home of Rembrandt and Spinoza (Descartes was nearby) and original figures like playwrights Bredero and Vondel, the ethicist engraver Coornhert, the political economist de la Court brothers and English traveling theater. We go from art to poetry, drama, philosophy and medicine. Spring Break is in Amsterdam with museum visits, guest talks and participation in recreation of traveling theater from the period.

This course explores early modern figurations of gender and sex in the literature and philosophy of Europe. We will look carefully at poetry, plays, utopian fiction, and natural philosophy from early modern England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the wider Atlantic world. Orienting our reading around the intersecting paradigms of faith, labor, and utopia, this course will offer us the chance to explore historical theories of gender, sex, and desire as well as consent, race, and property. We will also consider how early modern problems and assumptions inform more recent debates concerning gender and sexuality.

In this course, students will think dynamically about the relationship between archival records of Black life and Black women's creative expression to interrogate the possibilities and the limits of historical archives. Through hands-on engagement with archival objects in special collections and deep readings of literature, poetry, and visual arts, we will explore what the archival record affords, erases, and silences, and, conversely, how imaginative practices can begin to address and redress its subjects and their histories.